{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/islam-imperative-slam","title":"iSLAM: Imperative SLAM","arxiv_id":"2306.07894","date":"2023-06-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Taimeng Fu","Shaoshu Su","Yiren Lu","Chen Wang"],"abstract":"Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) stands as one of the critical challenges in robot navigation. A SLAM system often consists of a front-end component for motion estimation and a back-end system for eliminating estimation drifts. Recent advancements suggest that data-driven methods are highly effective for front-end tasks, while geometry-based methods continue to be essential in the back-end processes. However, such a decoupled paradigm between the data-driven front-end and geometry-based back-end can lead to sub-optimal performance, consequently reducing the system's capabilities and generalization potential. To solve this problem, we proposed a novel self-supervised imperative learning framework, named imperative SLAM (iSLAM), which fosters reciprocal correction between the front-end and back-end, thus enhancing performance without necessitating any external supervision. Specifically, we formulate the SLAM problem as a bilevel optimization so that the front-end and back-end are bidirectionally connected. As a result, the front-end model can learn global geometric knowledge obtained through pose graph optimization by back-propagating the residuals from the back-end component. We showcase the effectiveness of this new framework through an application of stereo-inertial SLAM. The experiments show that the iSLAM training strategy achieves an accuracy improvement of 22% on average over a baseline model. To the best of our knowledge, iSLAM is the first SLAM system showing that the front-end and back-end components can mutually correct each other in a self-supervised manner.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07894v5","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.07894v5.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"islam-imperative-slam","repo_url":"https://github.com/sair-lab/islam","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"bilevel-optimization","task_name":"Bilevel Optimization"},{"task_slug":"motion-estimation","task_name":"Motion Estimation"},{"task_slug":"robot-navigation","task_name":"Robot Navigation"},{"task_slug":"self-supervised-learning","task_name":"Self-Supervised Learning"},{"task_slug":"simultaneous-localization-and-mapping","task_name":"Simultaneous Localization and Mapping"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2306.07894","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}